User Experience Debt
UX debt is real and every digital product has some to repay. Some of this debt is incurred intentionally because tough decisions have to be made. Some of this debt is incurred unintentionally because assumptions about end-users go unchecked. It's time to start paying attention to the I.O.U.'s we're writing to our users. | May 7, 2013
Training vs. Design
Some thoughts on when to invest in design versus training. | Apr 10, 2013
When to apply UX effort in agile
When should you apply UX effort on an agile project to get the most out of it? Well, UX design skills are most valuable to agile processes at three key points: during modeling, during evaluation, and for facilitating day-to-day design activities. | Feb 21, 2013
In Praise of Difficult Questions
You know the moment. You're discussing the work you've poured your soul into for the past few weeks and someone asks a question. Normally, that's no problem because you know your stuff and you have rationale for all of the... | Nov 14, 2012
A Touch of the Extraordinary
Most of us would agree that the quality of our boss has a big impact on the quality of our job. A good boss supports us in ways that make us better at what we do, and a bad boss... | Aug 10, 2012
The Two-Click Rule
Over the past few years we've noticed a pattern on the corporate websites we've worked on: Most of the visitors enter through search or referrals. By most I mean 80% to 90%. Most visitors will see three or fewer pages.... | Apr 23, 2012
Three problems with your search-based website design
The City of Calgary launched a new website yesterday, billing it as "the first search-based website in Canada." Most web managers and user experience professionals have now seen Utah.gov, the search-focused website launched by the Utah state government a few... | Aug 16, 2011
The Problem With Your Website
A few weeks ago we posted an illustration on Flickr called "The Problem With Your Website." It describes an issue we've seen over the past few years with our own clients and throughout the industry. In a nutshell, the problem... | Mar 29, 2011
Our Sketching Table
We spend a lot of time at our computers, but we usually find that sketching and collaborating together is much more productive than sending email or chat. So a couple of months ago we built a sketching table to give... | Feb 18, 2011
Mind Your Inward Paths
My trip to San Francisco last weekend was delayed by an annoying business practice of United Airlines: overselling a flight so that economy passengers must check-in early to claim a seat--or risk getting bumped to a later flight. United... | Oct 19, 2010
Google Instant: What Will You Do With the Seconds You Save?
There's a spurious argument that some usability experts make to justify their work that goes like this: If we redesign an application and save every employee 5 minutes a day, that means we've saved 250 hours of time a day... | Sep 9, 2010
Design Lessons from my Bathroom
I’m a fairly dedicated DIY-er. I enjoy learning new skills and the sense of accomplishment it brings. I’m also really cheap, but that’s a topic for a different blog.I recently renovated a bathroom–a project that did not go entirely smoothly,... | Jul 20, 2010
Visualizing Information Structures: Some Examples
A couple of months ago I asked our staff to share examples of interesting ways of visualizing information structure. They promptly sent me a bunch of interesting stuff, then I got busy and put it aside for a while (sorry... | Jul 12, 2010
Our Favourite Concept Videos
Earlier this week we asked each person on the nForm team to send us their favourite concept video. Here are five of the best ones. Microsoft Courier Interface Demo Dennis says: "I have to say, this thing looks amazing. That... | Apr 9, 2010
A Thought About Web Analytics: Events are the Real Story
Sometime recently (in the last couple of months I'm guessing, but I just noticed it) YouTube changed the way they display video statistics. You can now easily access trend data about the number of views, favourites and comments right under... | Apr 1, 2010
My Top Interaction'10 Videos
In my previous post about the Interaction'10 conference I talked about some of the themes and the experience I had while there. Well, now you can have a little of that experience yourself! Along with the launch of the new... | Mar 2, 2010
Our Favourite Explain IA Entries
Over the past month the IA Institute ran an amazing contest called Explain IA. Entrants were asked to use words, pictures, diagrams or video to explain information architecture. There were more than 100 high-quality entires. But some of the entries... | Feb 19, 2010
Work Processes and Habits Part One: Bridget Smanten of Fridget Apparel
This is the first post for a series I will be doing about people working in various creative and research based professions. I will be exploring the different work processes, routines and tools that are used across various fields. Along... | Feb 11, 2010
Some thoughts on Interaction'10
I just got back from Interaction'10 in Savannah and am in the midst of a nasty conference hangover. After three full days of conference sessions, a day of workshops, and two more days of amazing conversations my brain is beyond... | Feb 10, 2010
With the release of its new tablet, will Apple finally fix the App Store?
If the rumours are true, tomorrow Apple will release a tablet device that runs the iPhone operating system. Like millions of other geeks, I'll be following Steve Jobs's keynote to see the big reveal. But I'll also be watching... | Jan 26, 2010
Building Trust - Edmonton UX Book Club November Meeting (Part 1)
Trust means making an exchange with someone when you do not have full knowledge about them, their intent or the things they are offering you. In our November UX Book Club meeting, we had a full agenda in which the... | Jan 17, 2010
Five User Experience Trends I'll be Watching in 2010
Predictions. They're invariably wrong, but we still love to make them. (Remember the Kitchen of Tomorrow?) Today I'm sharing five trends I'll be watching over the coming year (and beyond) along with some thoughts about how they might change our... | Jan 12, 2010
The fine art of listening
As UX practitioners we help create things that are better, more usable, better organized, easier to engage with, help sell more stuff or reduce costs (a non-exhaustive list). Many of our methodologies and approaches leverage a single important skill –... | Dec 22, 2009
CanUX Interview with Nathan Curtis
Our very own Jess McMullin caught up with Nathan Curtis, principal at EightShapes and author of the recently published book Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation. In the interview, Nathan talks a little about... | Oct 28, 2009
Edmonton UX book club – Designing for Social Web (A discussion with the author Joshua Porter)
We had our first author conversation at Edmonton UX Book Club at the July meeting. I would like to thank Joshua Porter,author of the book, Designing for Social Web, for agreeing to meet with us and Gene Smith for contacting... | Oct 7, 2009
Equity in Service Design
As kids head back to school, it is the season for signing up for various programs around the City. My husband and I decided to enroll our 6-year old daughter in a swim program. The City of Toronto offers three... | Sep 28, 2009
More Kiiro: Project Sync
A screencast of Kiiro's simple two-way sync between SharePoint and MS Project. | Aug 13, 2009
2009 Web Strategy Summit - A word with Dianne Howie
At the upcoming Web Strategy Summit Dianne Howie and Heather Searl will speak about the role of research in their session "Going Beyond Web Analytics to Dig into the Minds of Your Users." I was lucky enough to get a... | Apr 1, 2009
IA Summit 2009
Ten years. That's how long ASIST has been running the information architecture community's flagship event, the IA Summit. The first summit I attended was in 2001, and even then the practice seemed like it was just getting its legs. I've... | Mar 16, 2009
Interaction'09 Redux
From February 5th to 9th I attended the second annual Interaction Design Association conference, Interaction’09, in Vancouver. Over the course of the event a few major themes emerged from keynote presenters, sessions, and general conversation: Making the world better (Sustainability)... | Mar 12, 2009
My Web Favorites
Last June I spoke at Peachpit's Voices That Matter conference in Nashville about Tagging (here's my presentation if you're interested). While I was there I recorded a video with Nikki McDonald about my book and handful of other subjects. The... | Feb 12, 2009
UX in Time of Cholera
Things we can do or focus on during this terrible economic downturn: 1. Scenario planning through workshops/facilitation. This could be for our clients or for our own team/projects/company. 2. Collecting and interpretation of research to help companies/clients make tough decisions,... | Jan 29, 2009
An Obama quote that applies to design
In a recent interview between Time magazine execs Richard Stengel, David Von Drehle, and John Huey, then President-elect Obama was asked what success measures would voters be looking at in 2 years time, Obama said a number of things, including... | Jan 21, 2009
iPhones @ CanUX
As one might expect at a gathering of UX types, there were a number of iPhones on display at CanUX. Oh, there were Blackberries and other mobile devices as well, but they certainly weren't as visible. I made two observations... | Nov 21, 2008
A few words with Brandon Schauer
Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer recently shared a bit of insight with me in a short email interview. Those of you coming to CanUX will have a chance to ask him some questions of your own. Dennis: At CanUX you're going... | Oct 27, 2008
Brandon Schauer will Wow us at CanUX
One of the speakers at CanUX that I'm excited about is Brandon Schauer, Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path. Brandon is co-author of "Subject to Change", the book that Don Norman calls: "...the one perfect book that summarizes the essence... | Oct 20, 2008
Video: Dave Gray's Forms, Fields and Flows
In this video, Xplane founder Dave Gray explains some of the basics of visual language. It's just seven minutes, but packed with goodness--well worth your time if you're interested in visual thinking or design. If you liked this have a... | Apr 30, 2008
Why Agile sucks (most of the time)
Recently, a client of ours sent me this article on Agile development by David Longstreet (PDF), and asked me what I thought of it. Here are my thoughts: 1. This article is highly entertaining! At first, the graphics put me... | Mar 9, 2008
Datejs: Designing for developers
Our friend Geoff McGill has developed a new open-source Javascript library, Datejs, for handling dates. Normally this wouldn't be the kind of thing I'd blog about, but Geoff's done an excellent job designing the library so that it's usable. That's... | Dec 5, 2007
CanUX '07: The Business of Experience
We wrapped up CanUX 2007 on Tuesday but I'm still catching up on posting the presentations. Our own Jess McMullin closed the first day of CanUX with a talk on the business of experience. I've seen this talk evolve over... | Nov 29, 2007
CanUX '07: Tagging
I gave a short talk on tagging at CanUX '07 yesterday. I thought it went well, and I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who already *got* it. At the start of my session I asked how many... | Nov 29, 2007
CanUX '07: Eating Your Own Dog Food
Lou Rosenfeld opened CanUX '07 with a talk on building his new company on UX principles. | Nov 27, 2007
Client conversations are better than RFPs
Like a lot of consulting companies, we respond to RFPs. We have to; many of our favourite clients are forced to follow stringent procurement procedures. Responding to their RFPs is the only way we can continue to do business with... | Nov 22, 2007
Orienteering vs. teleporting
We often use the fuzzy terms "browsing" and "searching" to describe people's information seeking behavious. A recent CHI paper suggests two better metaphors: "orienteering" and "teleporting." | May 22, 2007
Twitter trading
I just got back from the IA Summit where our trading card game went smashingly well. A high point for me was watching people coordinate their trading over Twitter: You can find out more about the cards and the game... | Mar 27, 2007
Building Web Applications Workshop Recap
Last weekend, I was honoured to be one of the speakers at the "Inside the Production Pipeline: Building Web Applications" workshop in Banff, Alberta, Canada. I was asked to offer a user-centered perspective on website and application development. | Mar 9, 2007
Creating a Culture of Iteration and Innovation
I'm at Microsoft Canada's UX roundtable for the next couple of days (in lovely Bellevue, Washington). One of our first presentations was on the much-touted ribbon UI for Office 2007. The ribbon UI in Microsoft Word There's been a lot... | Feb 20, 2007
Some useful SharePoint links
Here are some great links for Windows SharePoint Service 3 (WSS 3) and
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) architecture and development. | Feb 15, 2007
The IIBA and you
I had the pleasure of being a guest at the International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA) last night. Admittedly, I was hesitant about going at first. I mean wouldn't my time be better spent working on feature based development in... | Jan 19, 2007